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Illinois Republican Representative, Joe Walsh shouldn’t be in Congress. He should be in a mental institution. He has been charged with being more than $100,000 behind in child support owed to his ex-wife, though he considers himself to be a family values champion. He has attacked his Congressional opponent, retired Colonel Tammy Duckworth for using her military service as an unfair advantage against him. He never served in the military and she is a double amputee from injuries suffered in Iraq. Now he’s attacking Sandra Fluke, who earlier this year was made famous by Rush Limbaugh’s attacks against her.

Walsh said at a campaign rally over the weekend, “So at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night their first prime time speaker was Sandra Fluke, whatever her name is.” “Think about this, a 31-32 year old law student who has been a student for life, who gets up there in front of a national audience and tells the American people, ‘I want America to pay for my contraceptives.’ You’re kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job Sandra Fluke.”

So he’s either deliberately lying to his supporters (??) about the Affordable Care Act’s contraception provisions or he’s just seriously, and completely stupid. Or both. Taxpayers don’t pay for contraception. Ever. And if they did, so what? And Sandra Fluke has never asked for taxpayers to pay for them. She has only advocated that insurance plans not be allowed to opt out of the coverage for religious reasons.

Either way, it’s obvious that he’s a seriously unhinged, psychotic man and unfit for office. Please, Illinois, kick this guy out of Congress. Anyone this awful doesn’t deserve to be one of 535 elite Americans tasked with passing federal laws.

Oh, and Joe Walsh should know that Sandra Fluke has indeed had a job. After she graduated from Cornell University she worked in New York City as a victim’s advocate against domestic violence and human trafficking. Much more important work than being a Congressman, Mr. Walsh. After several years doing that hard work, she decided to get a law degree to be better able to carry on the cause and was accepted by Georgetown Law School from which she just graduated this spring. I am sure she will find gainful employment that will give her a brighter future than that looming on Mr. Walsh’s horizon.

Paul Ryan has worshipped at the feet of Ayn Rand, at least until recently. He has publicly stated that her books were the most pivotal in shaping his public life. He gave them to interns as gifts, and they were required reading for his staff members. He spoke frequently about how the decline in America looked increasingly like something out of an Ayn Rand novel.

He is not alone among public servants in his admiration for Ayn Rand. Others include Sen. Rand Paul, who is named in her honor, and his father, Rep. Ron Paul. She was also mentioned as being very influential by President Ronald Reagan, Sen. Ron Johnson, Gov. Gary Johnson, Rush Limbaugh, former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But maybe the most famous follower of Ayn Rand is former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in the 1950s was part of her inner circle and a close personal confidant.

Ayn Rand seems to have a special appeal to younger people who are empowered by the idea of their individual greatness waiting to explode, ungoverned by the limitations that the world tries to place on them.

As someone once said: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Today we live in a country where millions of people object to the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing Social Security or Medicare. It seems as though the U.S. is the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor, and we can trace their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude directly to Ayn Rand.

One thing that isn’t always recognized about Rand’s thinking is that she was a textbook sociopath. In her notebooks she heaped praise upon a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used him as an early model for the type of “ideal man” she promoted in her more famous books. These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half century, including those named above as Rand acolytes.

The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand’s beliefs, and maybe understand those who are among her devotees, is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt.

William Hickman

Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with ardent praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so enthralled with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation, Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street, on him.

What Rand admired most about Hickman were his sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.'”

This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.”

William Hickman, the “genuinely beautiful soul” and inspiration to Ayn Rand was an under-educated ne’er-do-well, and psychopath whose only claim to public notice was the commission of a brutal and senseless murder.

While disturbing, it’s necessary to read at least the basics of his atrocious crime in order to better understand Rand and what made her tick, because her influence over the very people leading the fight to kill social programs, and her ideological influence on so many powerful bankers, regulators and businessmen who brought the financial markets crashing down, means her ideas are affecting all of our lives in the worst way imaginable, whether we know it or not.

Rand fell for William Edward Hickman in the late 1920s, as the shocking story of Hickman’s crime started to grip the nation. His crime, trial, case, and eventual execution were nonstop headline grabbers for months.

Hickman, who was only 19 when he was arrested for murder, was the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and grandmother. His schoolmates said that as a kid Hickman liked to strangle cats and snap the necks of chickens for fun. Most of the kids with whom he grew up thought he was a budding maniac, though the adults gave him good marks for behavior, a typical sign of sociopathic cunning.

After high school he embarked on a brief and increasingly violent crime spree, robbing dozens of gas stations and drug stores. Along the way it’s believed he strangled a girl in Milwaukee and killed his crime partner’s grandfather in Pasadena, tossing his body over a bridge after taking his money.

I remember very well when I was growing up, my father singing a song made popular at the time of the following crime, called “Little Marion Parker.” The horror of it swept the nation, and was only dwarfed by the later abduction and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son a few years later.

One afternoon, Hickman drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High school in Los Angeles, telling administrators he’d come to pick up “the Parker girl.” Her father, Perry Parker, was a prominent banker.

Marion Parker

The school administrator fetched young Marion Parker, and brought her out to Hickman. Marion obediently followed Hickman to his car as she was told, where he promptly kidnapped her. He wrote a ransom note to Marion’s father, demanding $1,500 for her return, promising the girl would be left unharmed. Hickman’s extreme narcissism comes through in his ransom letters, as he refers to himself as a “master mind [sic]” and “not a common crook.” Hickman signed his letters “The Fox” because he admired his own cunning.

Hickman and the girl’s father exchanged letters over the next few days as they arranged the terms of the ransom. By the time the last letter was sent by Hickman, he had already murdered and dismembered the girl.

According to a newspaper article from the time, he said, “It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he continued, “and I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead. Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Another newspaper account explained what Hickman did next: Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father.

Marion Parker’s body parts left along the road by William Hickman

Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled her head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive. When her father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Marion’s head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and fled. As he sped away, he threw Marion’s head and torso out of the car, and that’s when the father ran up and saw his daughter, and screamed.

This is the “amazing picture” Ayn Rand, guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing, admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.”

Other people don’t exist for Rand, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante’s bastardized Nietzsche, but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined “Behavioralism Gets The Blame,” a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounced the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas Hickman and others latched onto as a defense: “Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman’s original rebellion against society,” the article begins.

This aptly describes Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for “Supermen” like Hickman. Rand’s philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even “moral cannibalism,” to use her words. To her, those who aren’t like-minded sociopaths are “parasites,” “lice” and “looters.”

But with Rand, there’s something more pathological at work. She’s out to make the world more sociopath-friendly so that people like her hero William Hickman can reach their full potential, not held back by the morality of the “weak,” whom Rand despised.

Rand and her followers clearly got off on hating and bashing those they perceived as weak. This is exactly the sort of sadism that Rand’s hero, Hickman, would have appreciated.

What’s really unsettling is that even former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, whose personal relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1958 New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends: “Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Alan Greenspan.”

As much as Ayn Rand detested human “parasites,” there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her supermen — the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: “If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.”

Republican faithful like Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and declare, with pride, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.” Indeed. Except that Rand also despised democracy, writing that, “Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom.” This from the man who could be one heart beat away from the Presidency.

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Partiers dividing up the world between “producers” and “collectivism,” just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie. And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and bragging about how they are slashing these programs for “moral” reasons, just remember Ayn’s morality and who inspired her.

Critics of Ayn Rand would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, and hackneyed. But she can’t be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Tea Party crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as the Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town.

I couldn’t help posting this video. And the kid’s cute as can be, even if he is more mature than the adults who have filled him full of lies and distortions and then used him to get out a message that they want told. We teach our children to be honest, and to learn how to think for themselves, and how to not tell lies. Then parents like this fill their son up with lies and get him to repeat them. They tell him what to think and what to say, so that his words and thoughts are not his own, but rather a repetition of their own. Need we wonder where the next generation of non-thinking, lying, dogmatic conservatives will be coming from? Hopefully this kid will learn to see past the B.S. he is being, and will be fed, by parents who love lies more than they apparently love their son.

So to recap the lies and distortions:Obama takes money from people who work hard and gives it to people who don’t work at all. And since when didn’t the government collect taxes and distribute them into all of the programs for which funds have been allocated? Like defense, education, roads, and yes, programs that benefit those unable to work, and sometimes even those unwilling to work?

Wait in long lines to see a doctor. In some parts of the country those long lines existed before Obama became president, and no one can accurately predict the effects of the Affordable Care Act on the status of waiting lines. Just more hysteria without even knowing the facts yet.

Thinks babies are a burden. I don’t even know where this comes from or what it signifies, but someone must be reading the president’s mind if they pretend to know what he thinks.

Keep people on welfare and food stamps and they’ll vote for you. Just like when George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan kept people on these programs. Then again, statistically, welfare and food stamp recipients are not a very active voting bloc no matter who is president.

Doesn’t want Americans to drill for oil or mine for coal. There have been more drilling permits issued under Obama than under George W., more active wells now producing, more domestic oil being pumped, and no one I know has seen any reduction in coal production or use either.

Lets bad guys into our country. I don’t know what this means. There is no evidence that any more “bad guys” have come into the country under Obama than at any other time in recent history, and who are these bad guys anyway? It seems to me that from what I read and hear, Obama has had more bad guys taken out under his administration than under George W., including Bin Laden and lots of others with a massive increase in drone attacks and SEAL Team raids all across the Middle East.

Wants to take guns away. This administration has not put forth one single bill, plan, or twitch of the finger toward any type of gun control or confiscation, nor are they likely to do so.

Obama’s are not proud of America. Everywhere they go and every audience to whom they speak, they both extol the virtues of America and their pride in the country. Not only that, but they make the country proud of them, their actions, and how they conduct themselves at home and abroad.

Bows down to leaders of other countries. See above.

Nobody knows where he came from. Yes, in fact, we do know where he comes from. Hawaii, where he was born in 1961, more than adequately documented to anyone who is not brain dead or intellectually comatose. Oh, and who isn’t too much of a racist to believe that a man who had a black father could possibly not, himself, have been born in Kenya or some other country. I mean all of those people know for a fact that no American-born black man could ever rise up and be the leader of the free world. The tea party types have spent too many generations beating those people down to have them attain such a high position.

Representative Steve King (R-IA), the sponsor of an amendment to the House Farm Bill that will devastate the food safety laws that protect millions of Americans from illness, recently gave an interview bragging about what he had accomplished.

The King Amendment would essentially prevent states from developing strong independent health, safety, and cruelty standards, even if local voters want them.

This isn’t an unintended consequence. King says that his amendment “fixes the states and their political subdivisions regulating food production everywhere in America.” However, King might want to reconsider that position, as his amendment would legalize several horrific farming and food practices that some states have chosen to do away with:
• Florida, Ohio, and seven other states have banned confining pregnant pigs in cages that prevent them from moving their limbs or walking in a circle. Pigs confined in so-called gestation crates are forced to defecate where they stand, exposing them to serious risk of traumatic injury as a consequence of immobility, and the development of sores as a consequence of attempting to move against or bite the bars that confine them. They live their whole lives like this.
• Seven states have banned similar confinement for baby calves. So-called veal crates are designed to atrophy muscles to improve the taste of meat, creating what the ASPCA calls “lives of agony and frustration” for the cows until they are slaughtered at four or five months.
• Three states have banned tail-docking, wherein parts of cows tails are lopped off, often without anesthetics. The American Veterinary Medical Association opposes tail docking as unnecessary and highly painful.
• Maryland prohibits adding arsenic to chicken feed. Besides the obvious problems, this practice also spreads the poison into the surrounding soil as the chickens excrete waste.

Indeed, King has a long record of opposing animal welfare law — he has, for example, been Congress’ leading advocate against anti-dogfighting legislation. He also believes that the Humane Society and other animal rights advocates are attempting to ban “production agriculture” and has fantasized about exposing vegetarians with “an agenda for our diets” on the House floor.

King has often been cited by outside groups as the “dumbest member of the Congress.” While he certainly has a large number of challengers for this title, he may indeed be the logical choice for this honor.

Raped and battered women “are distractions” who only represent a “small portion” of South Carolina’s population. That’s how Governor Nikki Haley explained her decision to veto critical funding that goes to programs that work to prevent domestic abuse and rape.

Last week, Haley threw women across the state under a bus by abandoning funding that prevents domestic abuse and sexual assault and then added insult to injury by explaining that battered and assaulted women are a “small portion” of society and are mere “distractions” who don’t matter.

⁠“Each of these lines attempts to serve a portion of our population for which we extend our sympathy and encouragement,” Haley said. “But nevertheless, it is only a small portion of South Carolina’s chronically ill or abused. Overall, these special add-on lines distract from the agency’s broader mission of protecting South Carolina’s public health.”

Having a daughter who has worked on the front lines of domestic violence issues in the rough and tumble environment of inner city Chicago and small community programs in Indiana and Michigan, I know all too well the epidemic levels of this curse on our otherwise civilized society. For Governor Haley to dismiss it as a “small portion” of women, or a mere “distraction” enrages me, even though I have never lived, nor wanted to live, in South Carolina.

As a woman, you would think Governor Haley would make preventing rape and domestic abuse a major legislative and executive initiative. It’s bad enough that women already have to deal with male politicians who don’t care about women’s issues, but for a female politician to demonstrate how little she cares about curbing violence against women is even more detestable. The only real reason I can think of why she would veto this important funding is because she wants to prove how hardcore conservative she is. For many months now, Republicans have made it their mission to belittle women’s issues and reverse women’s rights.

Conservatives across the country have sought to abolish abortion rights and restrict contraception. Republicans in New Hampshire even attempted to roll back domestic violence laws, and the city of Topeka actually halted prosecuting those who commit domestic violence, essentially making it legal for men to beat their wives and get away with it.

Republicans in Georgia recently attempted to push for legislation that would require investigating all miscarriages. The legislation was sponsored by Bobby Franklin, who also wants to label women who are raped as mere accusers instead of victims. House Republicans have also taken aim at women by attempting to redefine rape so they can restrict abortion rights. In that particular bill, it’s only rape if violence is involved. In other words, date rape and statutory rape would be excluded from the definition. House and

Senate Republicans have also tried to kill the Violence Against Women Act which is crucial for protecting women from domestic violence and sexual assault. Republicans have also railed against equal pay for women and some have expressed regret that women have the right to vote.

Clearly, there is a war on women and Nikki Haley is demonstrating that even female conservatives are willing to wage it. At this point, the war on women has become less about simple pandering to the extremists within the Republican Party and has become an actual plank in the sick and twisted GOP platform. If women continue to be blind to what the GOP is doing, women will become less than second class citizens in the near future. If Republicans have their way, women will be mere property who must bend to the will of men.

Jesse Lee Peterson, a tea party activist who calls himself a “reverend,” frequently appears on Faux News. Peterson is the founder of an organization where Sean Hannity serves as an advisory board member, probably explaining how he gains access to the airwaves.

Peterson recently had a sermon of his go viral on YouTube in which he said that America’s greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in “the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them.”

In the video Peterson explains that he believes women simply can’t handle “anything,” and that in his experience, “You walk up to them with a issue, they freak out right away. They go nuts. They get mad. They get upset, just like that. They have no patience because it’s not in their nature. They don’t have love. They don’t have love.”

Despite his statements, Hannity welcomed Peterson on his show recently to castigate the Obama administration over “taking credit” for the Osama bin Laden assassination — but the segment didn’t exactly go as planned.

In his sermon he even doubles down, saying that he believes America went wrong when it gave women the right to vote.

“I think that one of the greatest mistakes America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote,” Peterson says. “We should’ve never turned this over to women. And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction.”

“And this probably was the reason they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman,” he adds. “They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen.”

On the Sean Hannity shortly after having given his sermon, Peterson was challenged by a female guest who accused him of misogyny. Peterson replied, “I don’t know if you noticed or not, but the liberal Democrat womens are calling themselves whores. They came out with their so called group of women who are within the Democrat party, and they are admitting that they’re whores and they are saying that they are proud of it. I’m okay with that, I just don’t want to pay for it.”

“I have a responsibility to tell the truth,” he added “You’re on the side of lies. Why shouldn’t I be on the side of truth? And it’s the truth that’s gonna make us free. Somebody gotta tell the truth, so I’m going to tell the truth.”

That “truth,” it would seem, isn’t just about liberal women, or even women in general. Peterson made headlines in January after telling a reporter that he would like to see black people put “back on the plantation so they would understand the ethic of working… They need a good hard education on what it is to work.”

In another post, he explains what he calls “the end of one-sided defense,” in which Peterson insists that men should re-take the right to physically strike women. “While I certainly do not sanction men attacking women, neither is it right for men to allow themselves to be beaten by a woman,” he wrote. “It’s time for men to re-assert their right to self defense.”

Rush Limbaugh is such a sad and pathetic man. And yet he deserves no sympathy. He has almost single-handedly destroyed civil discourse in the public forum in this country, and this is merely one more example of that fact.

Recently on his radio show, Limbaugh took a call from a man who wanted to blame Obama’s 2008 election on uninformed youth. Limbaugh interrupted him and said, ““Ehhh, I can do one better than that. When WOMEN got the right to vote is when it all went downhill. Because that’s when votes started being cast with emotion and uh, maternal instincts that government ought to reflect …….”

Rush stopped talking mid-sentence as if he’s realized what a horrible mistake he’s just made. His caller took advantage of the silence and continued talking about how young people are the ones ruining elections.

Here’s what is so sad about this. Rush wasn’t joking. Despite the fact that Limbaugh believes women are worth less than men, he will keep his women supporters. This is astounding. They will make excuses for him and continue to tune in for their daily dose of misogyny, lies and blatant hatred. These women are worse than the bloated ego-maniac. They inflate the audience numbers which pays his salary, and they vote. Even though Rush doesn’t think they should.